Fergie's folly is far from a major scandal

"Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar," was the verdict of the late Lord Charteris on the Duchess of York. Amazing how that piece of schoolyard viciousness endures. It sometimes seems hard for people to remember that being vulgar isn't a moral failing, and it certainly isn't blanket licence for spite.

When the Duke and Duchess were married, the architecture of their house was sneered at as "Southyork". At Budgie the Little Helicopter, we guffawed. When she sucked a toe — and which of us hasn't done worse? — we shrieked. At her work in America — Weightwatchers! eh? eh? The lardy cow — we sniggered. When she cried on TV we hooted. When she said she went out on the town with her daughters, we took special pleasure in cringeing.

But for a long time — despite the barracking from snobs and the damp-eyed and dribbling acolytes of Diana — Fergie and her ex-husband looked like the only real grown-ups in the royal family. When their marriage broke up, they maintained a friendship and shared the task of bringing up their children — rather than sneaking poison about each other into the public prints. By her account of it, she settled for no more than £15,000 a year in the divorce, and worked like billy-oh to clear her debts.

Now she has been trapped into making an idiot of herself — so drunk, it appears from the video, that she can't form a coherent sentence — by a tabloid sting operation. It's a grisly scene but it left me feeling sorry for her.

But the point is surely not that Fergie is corrupting our public life. It's that — even if she really wanted to — she couldn't. She's the tipsy ex-wife of a man with a pretend job, making empty promises to a pretend businessman. Meanwhile, quite unscrutinised, an entire industry of lobbyists and public relations men runs on promises of privileged access to actual power.

£500,000 for an introduction to Prince Andrew? The Special Representative for Trade and Investment? Give over. The real embarrassment is that she was so unworldly as to swallow the bait.

A colleague who saw the Duchess at a fundraiser on Thursday reports a face "etched with fear, tension and worry". Such was her state of mind that when someone in the audience made a welcoming remark at the beginning of her speech, she thought they'd said "clear off" and started shouting: "Who said that? Do you want me to leave?"

Humiliating the Duchess of York in the papers isn't a public service. It's a sport, and not a skilled sport like fencing or archery — more a recreation; the equivalent of sneaking oafishly into a field at night and pushing cows over.

Foolish, yes. Vulgar, yes. Greedy, yes – or, at the very least, desperate for cash. But let's not pretend this is some huge scandal. Rather, it's a small tragedy.

Rock'n'roll or Captain Sensible?

Promoting a new documentary about the making of 1972's Exile On Main Street, Mick Jagger says he has always been "pretty centred", something he attributes to his "very stable upbringing" in middle-class Dartford.

We know Sir Mick is careful with his money, knowledgeable about tax and interested in cricket. He recently explained that the reason the Stones suppressed Robert Frank's documentary, Cocksucker Blues, was, prosaically, because they were worried that footage of their drug use would prevent them getting visas for the US.

Now he punctures the cherished myth of the sybaritic months recording Exile in the South of France. Keef and pals were raising hell in the basement, sure. But replacement guitarist Mick Taylor was "overawed" and Bill Wyman, apparently, was pining for nothing more rock and roll than Branston Pickle.

Sir Mick himself recalls those months as "very restful". He dropped in for recording sessions, but then retreated to his own rented house with its "swimming pool and lovely lawn". "Lovely lawn"? Good grief. These days even Ronan Keating's starting to look edgier.

Twain's trysts talk of the town

Forget Jordan and Cherie Blair. The tell-all memoir everyone's agog to read is Mark Twain's, a document so hair-raising that its author forbade its publication within 100 years of his death. Now that time has come. The University of California will publish the first volume in November.

One Twain scholar says the account of his affair with his secretary — she once presented him with a vibrating sex-toy, but when they fell out he called her a slut and accused her of "hypnotising" him into giving her power over his estate — is "400 pages of bile". Joy!

Meat on the mind in the summertime

For some, the essence of summer is sunlight through foliage, the feel of grass under an elbow, or the sight of pretty girls in cotton dresses.